Give up, David Marr

There won’t be a human rights act in Australia, David Marr. Because Australia is freer than many countries with one. Because there is no crisis of rights in Australia. Because our mix of judge-made law, parliamentary democracy and an uninhibited media works better.
Because the recent slew of decisions out of the High Court show courts have quite enough power as it is.

Because a conservative government could load up a charter with things that many of us would dislike – right to work powers that would hurt what remains of the trade union movement or right to property that would limit environmental protection. Because a right to privacy, to give another example, would put paid to much freedom of the media. Because it’s fallacious to imagine that the only rights that will get a look in are those liberals and progressives want and that the judges of the future will all be Michael Kirbys and not Garfield Barwicks.

And because, as Marr himself acknowledges in his lecture, the Australian people do not want one and it is bit sneaky to look at slipping one in behind their backs as Father Brennan was trying.

There is a trash button on most computers and both sides of politics have pressed it.

America had a Bill of Rights for over 150 years before blacks in the South could vote and even then it wasn’t the constitution but their own mobilisation that did it. Stalin’s constitutional bill of rights was one of the most eloquent. In the end it is a country’s ethos and political culture – the instincts of its people – that determine its freedoms.

Yes, it is a reference to de Tocqueville – “ethos ” probably gives it away. Macaulay as well. Thanks for the correction. If words are your business you should always welcome one and I’ve corrected it, a spelling error too.

Well done Bob, a charter is defineltly something we don’t need. Anyone monitoring he legal nonsense that comes out of the US, the clear violations of both commonsense and justice that is perpetrated in the name of the Bill of Rights could not seriiously go down this route, unless blinded by ideology we can do without.

What a jerk for trying to psychoanalyse Isaacs and O’Connor as a self-hating Jew and forelock-tugging Irishman respectively. Maybe, just maybe, the old judges were smart enough to realise that the 14th Amendment didn’t do anything to prevent Jim Crow et al.

Book review – Wilson by A. Scott Berg

The entrenched view of Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States from 1913-1921, is that he was a prophet who wanted to make the world safe for democracy, his vision repudiated by a war-weary American people.
I have a different view. I believe Woodrow Wilson was incontestably the worst president in US history. The worst, because the damage he did outweighs that of any other. This includes George W. Bush, who in response to September 11 started wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Click here to read my review of A. Scott Berg's Wilson (2013).

Mabo (2012)

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